Weekly Roundup (1-7 September)

News revolving around Binance exchange has dominated this week’s cryptocurrency news. Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange in terms of adjusted trading volume, has been in the spotlight for good and not so good reasons. The Exchange generated over $78 million in profits from their Q1 2019 revenue, and its CEO Changpeng Zhao is not about to rest on his laurels.

On August 26, the crypto exchange announced it was launching Binance Lending. This new venture is going to be the Exchange’s crypto lending arm. Through it, the business will make more revenue from the interest earned. Binance Lending kicked off its operations on August 28, and, it is at the moment allowing investors to lend ETC, USDT and BNB tokens for interest.

The annualized interest rate for a 14 day fixed maturity term stands at 15 percent for BNB, and 10 percent for USDT. Ethereum classic tokens are earning a minimum of 7 percent as interest. Before the crypto-verse could catch its breath, the crypto exchange launched Binance X, just three days following the launch of Binance Lending.

Binance’s new offering is part of the Exchange’s goal of boosting cryptocurrency mass adoption. Teck Chia, Binance X’s head, says that “The long-term goal of Binance X is to foster a thriving developer ecosystem that innovates on products and services that would advance the crypto ecosystem and contribute to crypto adoption.”

Binance X is going to support crypto developers to enable them to succeed in crypto project developments. The platform is going to connect developers from other Binance supported programs such as Binance Launchpad, Binance X Fellowship, and Binance Labs Incubation.

The cryptocurrency Exchange has also made a newsworthy acquisition. The other new Binance product is as a result of the cryptocurrency exchange’s purchase of JEX. JEX is a Seychelles based cryptocurrency asset trading firm that has specialized in derivatives and spot trading services. Now known as Binance JEX, this new Binance product will work independently within the vast Binance ecosystem.

Binance is keeping the JEX team intact but will manage the JEX tokens together with its Foundation. The cryptocurrency exchange plans to convert JEX tokens from their Ethereum ERC 20 format to conform to the Binance Chain standard.

Even more exciting news from the exchange is that it is launching a token airdrop worth 200 million worth to BNB holders. BNB holders with a minimum of ten tokens in their wallets could benefit from the campaign running for 12 months.

Be sure to check out the article to find out how you can benefit from the airdrop.

In the good news category, BitMEX accused Binance of white paper plagiarism. BitMEX on Twitter pointed out what looks like similarities between its Bitcoin Futures platform documentation and that of the Binance’s Testnet Futures.

The tweet sarcastically congratulated Binance telling the exchange that they hoped that they had had as much fun reading their white paper as much as BitMEX had fun writing it.

CZ apologized, saying that he was ashamed over the glaring similarities between the documentations.

The Central African state of Burundi has also made news after issuing a statement that they are banning crypto trading. This retrogressive move has come at a time when a large part of the African continent is immersing itself in digital currency trading. Urging caution, a statement from the country’s central bank read:

“Virtual currencies are traded on unregulated online platforms around the world, and their values ​​are highly volatile, resulting in speculative transactions that expose the users of these currencies to potential losses without any possibility of legal recourse.”

This ironically comes at a time when behemoths in Asia like Alibaba and HTC are diversifying their portfolio, and investing more in blockchain startups. HTC, the Taiwanese electronics giant, and Alibaba have invested in BitMark, a digital property rights startup.

Meanwhile, we also took a look at the emerging digital economy cold war between US and China. In its first-ever Digital Economy Report, the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) highlighted the dominance of the two superpowers. The UNCTAD also noted that the two nations hold 90 percent of the market capitalization value of the world’s 70 largest digital platform companies. This suggests a move from the long thought North-South divide to two competing powers. With Libra coming out of the US and national cryptocurrency from China, it certainly looks like this war is only beginning to heat up.